API Days Nordic 2016

This week I’m attending API Days Nordic at the University of Tampere (Finland), a technical conference on heavy industry and APIs, government driven API platforms, and APIOps (APIs, DevOps, containers, testing, micro services, and monitoring). This is part of the API Days series of conferences and it is the first time that it is organised in Finland.

My presentation focuses on how to deploy an API gateway with Docker. The slides are available here and the code is on GitHub. This is the summary of my presentation:

An API gateway is a single entry point for APIs in a microservices infrastructure. It provides authentication and authorization layers, routes and load balances requests to API services, and caches previous requests. Being the first entry point of the API, it is crucial to manage and provision it through code rather than using a manual process. Furthermore, replicating its configuration on development and staging environments allows to load test the API gateway and to anticipate issues before it is deployed to production.

I demonstrate the deployment of an API gateway using Docker. Technologies used include:

Docker

openresty/nginx

3scale API management

AWS EC2

I discuss the benefits of using Docker and how it simplifies changes of configuration and deployment to multiple environments. Sample code and brief documentation are available on GitHub.